


Through a Frosted Glass of Fireflies

by PaxDuane



Series: The FaeU [1]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Family, Folktales, Light Bondage, M/M, Multiple Orgasms, Pre-Relationship, Repaying Debt, Russian Folklore, Temperature Play, background Ahsoka Tano, background Jango Fett, background clones, functionally sex work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:26:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29012769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxDuane/pseuds/PaxDuane
Summary: On a quest to free their father from the Faery King's Halls, seven brothers pass through the lands of the Count of Winter.Hardcase stays behind to pay off his brothers' tolls.(The FaeU, aka, the HardCount Fairytale and Russian Folktale AU)
Relationships: Dooku | Darth Tyranus/Hardcase
Series: The FaeU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2128395
Comments: 18
Kudos: 43





	Through a Frosted Glass of Fireflies

**Author's Note:**

> Half the worldbuilding for this didn't make it into this one-shot, so uh. At least there's a sequel hook available? If y'all want.
> 
> This is only like. Kind of Apples's fault. Because let's be real, this is my shit. I grew up on Russian folktales and I love being able to pull the tropes apart to see how they work, so I very much projected that hyperfixation onto Hardcase.

“I will let you pass, but one of you,” the Count says, “Must stay behind.”

Silence cracks through them, like a frozen lake under a skate.

“We came here to free someone,” Rex says, “We’re not going to leave another…”

“You misunderstand,” the Count drawls, cutting him off. “If whoever stays behind manages to pay off your toll and their place here, they will be able to return with you when you pass through again, on your way out of my lands.”

Kase knows that Rex won’t ask any of them to do it, but he can’t stay here himself. The other brothers need him to guide them to find Buir. Boba, Tup, and Dogma are too young to stay on their own. Cody is the best option to physically defend the others. Fox is their sneak, the best one to get Dad out.

“I’ll stay,” he says, before anyone else can offer.

The Count’s eyes snap to him.

“Hardcase,” Rex says, voice wrecked, “No, you—.”

“I did my part with the Wild Heads’ puzzle,” Kase tells him. “You all can get through the rest of this without me, and you’ll swing back through to pick me up once you have him.”

Cody and Fox exchange a look before looking to Kase. “Are you sure?” Fox asks.

He nods.

“You can’t be serious,” Rex snaps, “There has to be another way.”

“Not through the Count’s lands,” Kase points out. “And the Wild Heads said this was the safest way for anyone, Fae or mortal, to reach the Hall.”

The Count chuckles and leans forward, hands clasping in a facsimile of a clap. “You managed to get that out of them?”

Fox meets the Fae’s eyes. “He did,” he says, nodding back to Kase.

The Count’s smile clings to Kase’s skin. “I welcome anyone who can best those reckless guardians.” The Fae’s eyes sweep across Kase’s brothers. “Go, find your quarry, and return. By then your brother will have paid. And, freely given as he gives himself, beware the One Without Fear. He may seem bright and kind, but he can change in an instant with only the slightest reason his mind gives.”

Fox nods. “We accept.”

Rex hisses, but Cody cuffs him on the shoulder. Surely, it will be the argument as they go forward, but Kase won’t be there for it.

He watches them go, all hesitant in it but still going, and, once they are gone, he turns to the Count.

“What would you have me do?” he asks.

“Twenty gems for a day’s room and board,” the Count explains, “And twenty for each of your brothers’ passage through my lands. My people will pay you to do favors for them, to run parcels to each other, or to fulfil some small quest.”

Kase inspects the gem the Count gave him to check, suspecting it is hardly that easy. “Can they not do these things themselves?” he asks, handing the gem back.

The Count presses the width of the gem to his thin lips. “There are things they cannot do as easily as a mortal or once-mortal. They cannot die, so they have no reason to find other ways.”

Kase knows the rules of the Fae world from his father’s stories. But those stories are just as well on their own. “There are mountains they’d have me cross in a day, grain from sand they’d have me separate, stars they’d have me harness. I do not have shoes that fly or a mother’s doll to feed or a god’s blood in my veins.”

The Count presses one corner of the gem to Kase’s forehead, then drags it down his nose to his lips. “Tell my people, tonight, how you thwarted the Wild Heads, and I will pay you fifty gems.”

Kase stares at him, no matter how impolite it might be. “Alright,” he says.

He tells the story and, after that, as the village feast rages, fae after fae comes up to him and asks his help. He dispenses advice, makes considering noises about parcel and message delivery, and altogether is exhausted by the time it all ends. Exhausted and with at least two days filled with favors.

The Count leads him back into the castle, Neuschwansteinian but dreary, and does not comment on his exhaustion or his schedule.

“What should we call you?” is all the man murmurs as he delivers Kase to a room with a view of the nearest village and a gorgeous, richly clothed bed.

Kase hesitates, like any good Fett, but in the end he says, “Hardcase.” His family have called him that for as long as he can remember, but it’s not his name. Just like Fox, Dogma, Tup, and Boba’s “names.” Cody and Rex have nicknames too, but they’re far less on the family tongues.

The Count’s lips twist up, but Kase isn’t sure he’d call it a smile. “A good night to you, Hardcase.”

The temptations are, of course, there from the beginning.

The bed is sinfully comfortable and warm and it almost begs for Kase to stay in it all day instead of rising with the sun. A menagerie of sweets awaits him for breakfast, each so different that they would all need to be tasted to fully know them. The walls of the castle twist, confusing him as he attempts to get out.

He didn’t expect it to be fair. No tale is fair.

He did expect it to try harder.

His first trip of the day is to help a woman with her pigs, which have a habit of attempting to make off with her neighbor’s daughters. His advice, of course, is to stop turning the most disgusting mortals who she stumbles across into pigs. Pigs are far too intelligent for the men to lose their brain capacity. To help with the at hand problem, though, he helps her herd them off to a market a few villages over. They cross a winding river that puts itself in their way three times before they convince it to let them past, in return for a pig, but eventually arrive. Half the profits for the pigs go to him, adding one hundred gems to the fifty in his sack.

At that village, another of the people who had asked for his help takes his attention. She needs a guide into the foothills of the mountain, and all Fae mountains are the same—at turns deadly and boring. He guides her, hiding them at times from a wolf that walks on two feet and smokes a foul-smelling pipe, a pine tree that sneaks about like a Betty Boop cartoon, and a stone that rolls up and down the mountain in hopes of crushing some living thing. Once they arrive at her grandmother’s house, he’s given another ten gems and sent off to find his way back down.

For lunch, he gives fifteen gems to a man who is roasting a strange looking fowl for some of its flesh, another five to a baker for a loaf of bread, and a single large gem to an elderly woman at the village well to pull him up a drink. She also gives him a scarf to wind around his shaved head, so he knows it was worth it.

A group of beautiful young people in a village square ask him to dance with them, they only need one other. A lion chats with him about the weather on the road to the Count’s castle. An old man asks him for a spare gem and he gives four.

Into the Count’s lockbox, twenty gems for the night before, twenty for Boba’s passage, and twenty for tonight. He sits down across the long table from the Count with 75 gems.

The Count asks him nothing, tells him nothing, but Kase suspects he knows exactly what has gone on.

He goes to bed that night with four more people left to visit.

Every accidental brush of hands or caught gaze that Kase has with the Count burns into him for hours after. Catching the attention of a Fae this powerful will either end in disaster or immense wealth; there’s not an in between.

More than anything, the next morning, he wakes to find the fae in his room and nearly starts. Before he can even get out of bed and form a real greeting, the Count hands him a stack of clothes.

“A gift, freely given,” the Count says, before vanishing back out into the castle.

Where his fingers slid over Kase’s as he placed the clothing in his hands burns presently in his mind as he focuses on dressing. The shirt is a tunic, with a wide cloth belt, in black with black embroidered with firebirds and fruited trees—the tree of life. Leather boots were sandwiched in between the tunic and a closefitting pair of breeches, in charcoal grey, that are also black and sit just below his knee.

The moment they’re on, though, he sets about ignoring the lingering burn, the pleasant birdsong that he could listen to forever, the twisting walls of the castle, and sets back out.

Kase should have realized that, eventually, he would be visiting a witch.

The house is small, but ornate. It’s in red and white, with a small onion dome and an abstract stained glass window the length of the house. What makes it a witch’s house, though, is that it’s on a pair of chicken legs.

Kase sighs and asks the house to hold still long enough to let him in. Inside, he finds the house is bigger than it looked outside, by far. The one-story appearing house now is closer to three, filled to the roof with books, from the extended length of the stained-glass window.

A young woman peers at him from the kitchen. “You’re the Prince?”

He snorts. “More the Fool.”

She frowns.

“Four of seven,” he adds, sighing.

She lights up. “Baba will see you above.”

He takes that in stride, resolving to panic about this later, and takes the massive stair up. He finds the Baba at a loom in a big room filled with wool thread. And when he says filled, he means that the thread and thicker yarn are piled like curls to the ceiling by the walls and cascading over every inch of floorspace.

“Baba?” he asks.

The old woman cocks her head but does not look at him. Instead, she waves him in.

He picks his way through the piles of wool to kneel by her stool. She has a small, pinched face and pursed lips as she weaves the wool.

She eyes him in her periphery. “So, you’re the boy the Count is favoring.”

“I’m…” He wasn’t sure he’d go that far. But the gifted clothing fits perfectly to him. The boots do not pinch. And they’re all in the colors the Count prefers himself. “I suppose I am?”

She smiles and nods, then weaves in silence for a while.

He does not ask what she wants or needs; he knows better.

“I need a specific plant,” she says, “With five white petals on a long stem. The stamens are blue and the veins of the petals are red. If you find it, dig it up with roots intact, and deliver it to me, I will reward you.”

“Where does it grow?” Kase asks.

The Baba smiles. “You’ll find it in the snow.”

The mountain, then. He doesn’t sigh outwardly, not wanting to offend, but he feels it inside. When in doubt, it’s the mountain. He briefly wonders if the new boots will hold up in the snow but pushes that aside. There’s no reason they shouldn’t.

“Merrin will want to go with you,” the Baba says as he starts to pick himself out of the wool. “You aren’t her Ivan, but she’ll still want to go.”

“Should she go?”

The Baba shrugs. “It won’t hurt.”

He carefully does not groan, instead making his way back out of the house. Sure enough, the young woman trails out of the kitchen, a bag packed with food, and follows him. She asks question after question, and he answers as patiently as possible, and in turn she shares the food with him when lunchtime comes. When the reach the snowy area of the mountain, he is the one to find the flowering plant but she provides the spade to dig it out. He’s careful to keep the roots intact, as requested, despite Merrin’s impatience. She’s more performatively disappointed when they reach the house again, by the end.

The Baba is waiting in the kitchen, for them, and happily takes the plant. In return, she doesn’t give him gems as he expected.

She hands him a mirror.

It’s old and bronzed in areas, but as it shifts from her hands to his he catches a glimpse of familiar faces. He stares, near entranced, to watch his brothers journeying with another man, pale and fae with chestnut waves and an easy smile.

He bows to the Baba and walks carefully out of the house, still holding the mirror. Once he knows he’s out of sight, he runs. He runs and runs and runs until the forest breaks apart for a road and he stops short at the black carriage waiting, driverless.

The door to the carriage is open, the Count’s long legs visible inside.

He pauses, chest heaving.

“Well?” the Count asks. “Come along.”

Kase pauses at the entrance to the carriage, looking in.

The Count is sour faced, with pursed lips. “You only need to tell me what she wanted,” he eventually says.

Kase’s fingers twitch against the door to the carriage.

“Hardcase, please.” For a fae, he sounds exhausted.

Kase climbs inside, the door snapping shut behind him, and settles on the padded seat across from the Count just as the carriage starts forward. Thanks to the fae’s sprawl, their legs tangle together no matter how Kase keeps himself drawn up. After a moment, he gives in and relaxes. “The Baba wanted a specific plant.”

The Count looks unimpressed.

Kase sighs and describes it, where it was and how she wanted it.

The Count shakes his head. “Baba Nu has a tendency to stick her nose where it does not belong.” His eyes sharp on the mirror that Kase settles in his lap. “And that is?”

“The payment,” Kase says softly. Gems may have been better for keeping his debt clear, but this mirror…

“Баба вмешивается,” the Count mutters. “May I?”

Kase bites his lip and passes the fae the mirror, watches as he turns it over in his hands and inspects the tarnished filigree. It must be fully fae made, to look so natural in his hands.

“Three hundred gems for it.”

“What?” he asks, shaken.

“I will give you three hundred gems if you give it to me,” the Count repeats, voice a drawl but gaze heavy and prickling on Kase’s skin.

Three hundred gems would easily pay for the rest of the tolls, for most of his debts incurring over the rest of his family’s quest. It’s…which is more tempting? The lack of work he’d have to do or the ability to keep up with his family.

“I…” The carriage kicks forward, sending him falling forward. He flails, then burns as the Count catches him. The fae’s grip on him is steadying, a line of raging heat on his waist and down his thigh where one knee is pressed to his instep. When he looks up, the Count is near turned around to the screened window out to the driver.

He gently pulls himself from the Count’s grip to settle beside him, this time.

A panel on the screened window is pulled and a voice says, “A comb was thrown, and the forest ended up in front of the horses, sir.”

The Count sighs heavily. “Stepdaughters,” he drawls. “Carry through.”

“I can’t sell it,” Kase says, when the Count turns back to him.

The heavy gaze pricks his skin on the hemmed neckline of the tunic. Still, the Count does not argue. He carefully hands Kase back the mirror, fingers brushing his, and nods. They do not speak the rest of the ride.

When Kase drops his twenty gems for room and board, concerned now for the state of the count, his heart sinks to notice that fifteen gems have gone missing. He says nothing, not of the missing gems or the girl who likely took them.

As they part for the night, the Count briefly rests a hand on his cheek as he bids him to sleep well and Kase’s breath stops until the fae is out of sight.

Kase actually manages, the next day, to get to the final three people he’d planned to help from that first evening.

A Mountain Snake asks him to find a gold key he lost in the foothills, which takes much of the day, but, while he searches, he manages to convince a village’s Alkonost to bring the fields’ rain. For those two, he manages to double his seventy gems, though twenty goes again to lunch.

Then, on his way back to the castle, a little girl from the feast finds him. Her stepmother and stepsisters have again banished her from the house until supper. That first night, she said she’d needed help getting her chores done by the time her father returned. This late afternoon, she’s near tears for again not having things done thanks to being banished outside.

Maybe Kase is meanspirited, maybe he’s thinking more like a mortal than a fae, but he simply…asks if she wants to have supper with he and the Count.

She blubbers and hems and haws, but, in the end, she’s still walking hand and hand with him when he returns to the castle. The Count tilts his head and listens to Kase explain her story, eyes never leaving his face.

“Well,” he tells the little girl, so, so gently. “You will have dinner with us tonight, and you will sleep here in the castle, and tomorrow we will see what the new day brings.”

She chatters through supper, smile bright, and fills the emptiness that the table has had in the last nights with the silence with a child’s light. Kase smiles and keeps her attention on the present no matter her meandering like his buir once did for him, he sneaks her extra dessert from his plate, then carries her dozing form back to his room for the night, waking her so she can dress in a small nightgown one of the dominion spirits brings and brushes and plaits her hair. She hugs him around his neck and kisses his cheeks as he puts her to sleep on one side of the big bed.

He slips back out, intending just to say goodnight to the Count and pay his board and two of the tolls, and finds the fae in one of the greatest libraries he’s ever seen.

The Count does not turn to him, when he enters, but still says, “These are the stories of my people.”

Kase stares at the shelves and shelves of books, of the maps of the Count’s lands and others’ lands, at all these things he would give anything but family for.

“Story after story,” the Count continues, “Of heroes. I hope tonight’s will be added in time.”

“I didn’t…” he trails off as the Count turns.

“You saved a child much grief,” he tells Kase. “You saved her from having to become her own hero, years and years from now.”

He searches the fae’s face, like it will tell him anything. “What are you going to do?” he asks, barely above a whisper. Asking questions of the Count, really, is something he’s avoided. The dominion spirits, maybe, but…

“I am going to see to it that either changes are made in her household or she is placed somewhere she will be properly taken care of.” The Count nods to him. “I’d ask you come with me.”

“Of course,” he says, because this is a child. ‘Of course’ is the only answer.

The Count smiles. “Consider whatever you were going to pay me tonight filled.”

“I was going to pay two tolls, along with last night’s expense,” he protests.

The Count’s fingers are warm where, again, they cup his cheek. “Consider it paid, Hardcase.”

Kase feels about to shake apart. “Alright.”

Kase holds the little girl in his lap as the carriage trundles along down the road to her village. This time, he sits next to the Count from the start no matter that the fae’s broad shoulders press a line of heat against his own.

She’s quiet; all of them are. Something about today makes Kase want to run and hide, taking her with him.

The carriage stops at the cottage gate, two taller girls sitting silently by the corner of the fence, staring at them with wide eyes.

“Vasillisa!” one of them calls, shaking her head fervently, desperately.

The door to the cottage slams open, an angry man with sulfurous yellow eyes charging out. Behind him, a cold looking woman scowls.

The man stops short, but the woman glowers at the little girl still in Kase’s arms.

“Get in here,” she hisses, angrily pointing into the dark cottage.

“No,” the Count says, voice drawing the woman’s attention. “I do not think she will.”

The man stumbles back. “Your Grace, we…”

“No,” the Count says again, like a cold snap. “I will speak to you inside.”

The two adults flee in.

The Count turns to Kase and the trio of girls. “Take them to a neighbor. They don’t need to see this.”

Eyes wide, Kase nods and shoos the two older girls on ahead of him, taking them far across the village square to another cottage and knocking on the door. The kindly old woman who answers the door thankfully listens to his explanation inside.

“Of course they may stay here, for the night,” she says. “I don’t have much, but…”

“I’ll pay,” Kase says quickly. “For their food, and…”

“Nonsense, dear,” the old woman says, frowning. “It’s not a debt, and certainly not yours. All the girls need to do is do some chores for me. Just come back for them tomorrow. I cannot take care of them forever.”

The girls agree with the eagerness of those escaping violence. Kase agrees to return for them. Before he leaves, he goes down on his knees before the girls and promises he’ll find somewhere good and safe for them to live, if they promise to get along.

Like only the Fae can, they swear to it.

He walks numbly back out to find the Count’s shirt changed and neighbors coming to clean out the cottage the girls lived in, let’s the Count bustle him back into the carriage and back to the castle for a done day, does not ask what was done.

It’s seems just as right that when he stumbles back into his room and checks the magic mirror that Baba Nu gave him, it has gone red. He’s so tired, of the day, at first that it doesn’t completely sink in what might be happening.

Once it does, he takes it to the Count, who sits in the library and frowns and circles it, counterclockwise, with his middle and ring fingers.

“They made the mistake of befriending the One Without Fear,” the Count eventually sighs.

“What can I do?” Kase asks, begs.

The Count’s eyes are sharp on him. “Nothing.”

“I can’t lose them,” he says, fingers clutching on the edge of it and ready to dash the damned mirror on the floor. “Please, if you could send someone—I’ll pay. I’ll pay!”

The Count catches him by the arms. “As it stands, it would take you far longer to repay that, even if the tolls were paid off, than you would be able to pay by the time they returned.”

“Is there nothing I can do to pay it, faster, then?” he asks.

The Count frowns, fingers searing his arms. “Five hours.”

“What?” he nearly hiccups.

“Let me have you, for five hours. For each hour, you will earn a glut of one hundred gems. And five hundred gems would pay for the help I can send.”

“Yes,” he says, not even letting himself think exactly what the Count intends, not yet. “Yes, I’ll let you have me.”

The Count nods and lets him go, taking the mirror from his hands and laying it on the desk beside him. “I’ll arrive at your room with luncheon in one hour and we will discuss the details then. I will see that help is sent to your family.”

He can’t help himself. “Thank you,” he says, before fleeing the room.

Lunch is bland and able to be eaten with his fingers, with tall glasses of tea. Calculated, Kase realizes, as the Count goes through every single thing he’d like to do to him, allowing him to veto anything. He’s not sure how much he trusts himself, so he agrees readily to some things he normally wouldn’t.

He holds his hands above his head, shivering as the Count strips off his tunic then binds his hands together. The fae’s hands sweep down his sides and his lips press against Kase’s bare neck as he unknots the two side ties of the breeches. As the ties come lose, Kase gasps as the fae gently bites down, not hard enough to leave a mark, as agreed.

The Count steps him out of the fallen breeches, then lays him across the bed, lashing his bound hands held center between the headboard and the footboard, leaving his legs bent over the other side.

With clinical efficiency, the Count strips himself, revealing salt and pepper hair across his chest and tattooed bands on one arm.

As the fae slips Kase’s smalls off of him, Kase finds himself shivering and gooseflesh rising in a trail after the Count’s fingers.

Soothingly, the Count strokes cool fingers along his thighs. Why he’d thought the fae hot skinned before, he’s unsure, as frost tingles across the delicate skin there.

He shuts his eyes to it but doesn’t try to stifle the little gasps and moans that drip out of his mouth.

“Would you like me to blindfold you?” the Count asks with no little humor. There’s the distinct pop of a cork out of a glass bottle.

“No,” he manages to get out before he’s cut off by his own whine as a slick finger presses into him. He clutches at the rope that connects the bindings at his wrists to the tethers to the bed. His thighs are tense and his feet are pointed near straight at the wall.

The Count chuckles. With a dry hand, he catches one of Kase’s calves and presses his leg back, bent at the knee just so he can kiss Kase’s ankle. “So sensitive already.”

If this were another mortal, he’d joke about how long it’s been, but the cold of the Count’s fingers burns and soothes at once as the fae slides it down Kase’s leg, briefly lighting at his knee before pressing at his thigh.

He shivers full body as the Count pumps that one icy finger in and out of him, spread open from being half curled up. When a second finger is added, his eyes fly open with his gasp.

“There you are,” the Count murmurs, leaning over him to kiss his pleasure-slack mouth.

He whimpers as the two fingers scissor inside of him, teasing and pressing until they press against his prostate and stars burst across his vision. When his hips buck, trying to push back into that feeling, they retreat back from the spot in favor of continuing adjusting him to the stretch.

His cock leaks spend over his twitching stomach and, again, fingers press against his prostate and send his back arching as he moans. They rub and gently prod, and he feels the tightening of muscles and nerves as he comes dry, knee over the Count’s shoulder.

Whining, he presses back towards the fae as he drags his fingers along his insides while extracting them. The cool body pulls away from him, then two dry hands dance ice across his side, all the way along his arms to the tether. They tug, and then he’s being flipped over onto his stomach.

“That’s one, but we still have so much time,” the Count murmurs, squeezing his ass with both hands as he urges him up just slightly, legs wide so he’s still close to flush with the edge of the bed even on his knees. The prickle of cold follows the lines of his tattoos, the sensation foreign in its familiarity, so used is he to them being traced by lovers’ hands and mouths.

He comes five more times, dry, in various positions as the Count slowly opens him up, then another three on the Count’s cock before the man finally wraps a hand around his own cock and pumps. Even covered with spend and twitching with overstimulation, it’s not over, be he loses track.

The Count makes sure to spend time with his mouth and fingers on every inch of Kase’s body, with special attention to the lines of his stomach and every stroke of his various tattoos.

When four hours are gone, spend coating his thighs as the Count bounces him on his cock and his mind blank with almost anything besides _moretoomuchmoretoomuch_ , a bell rings clear in the evening air.

The Count spends the next hour spoiling him, for lack of a better word. He’s gently cleaned with a wet cloth, then carried to a large bathroom with copper and bronze walls, a large tub, and filigree tile on both floor and ceiling that makes him feel, in combination with the floating of his endorphin high, that there is no gravity in it.

The tub, which he suspects might be hammered gold, is filled and musky florals are poured in, as oils and as dried buds. He comes fully back to his mind in the warm water, back plastered to the Count’s chest and arms twisted up to clutch at the fae’s shoulders. He squirms in the arms wrapped around his stomach, but the five hours isn’t up.

“Gorgeous,” the Count murmurs in his ear as he pets him, taking his whines and whimpers and pants as his do as he wrings a final orgasm from him in the water. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

He pants and lets the fae help him, shaking legs and all, out of the tub, lets him wrap him in soft towels and pat water from his skin, though it sometimes turns to ice that drips down him in the mess of body heat. It’s only then, at that sight, does the Count lose that one agreement, but Kase finds he doesn’t mind as the man sucks marks against his ribs.

He’s fed little treats, chocolates and cakes and warm bread with thinly sliced roast beef that fill him.

The Count dresses him in a silk shirt, perfectly sized and with white-on-white embroidery that edges the hem that falls just above his knees, and kisses him painfully sweetly as the fifth hour ends. The moment that bell rings, the Count’s hands drop away.

A servant leads Kase back to a cleaned and aired room.

It’s late in the morning when Kase finally wakes up, sore and still exhausted. He blearily blinks sleep from his eyes and nearly falls out of the bed.

There’s a wardrobe and a new door.

The wardrobe is huge, tall and made of dark wood. When he opens it, clothes nearly spill out, it’s so full. When he inspects the door, he is flustered to find it opens to the same bathroom from the night prior.

He scrambles to dress and put the new additions out of his mind, even putting on something from the wardrobe. It all fits perfectly, Fae made, but he actually can’t be sure it was the Count. While he wouldn’t put it past him, the sudden appearance of the door and the castle’s tendency to do whatever it wants gives an excuse that it is simply the castle itself that’s done this.

He scrambles out of the room, nearly careening into the Count, who gently steadies him.

“The girls, then?” the fae asks, like nothing just happened. Like nothing happened the night before.

“Ah, uh. Yes. The girls.” He winces as his back twinges, only to relax into the cold of the Count’s hands on his lower back. He carefully doesn’t comment. “What do you think? Of where they should go.”

The Count hums. “I believe they would do well in the castle. There are plenty of people to watch them and teach them, and it gives a place for princes to come and make brides of them one day.”

It’s strange, to hear that said and meant, deconstruction as it is of Faery. It’s clinical and calculated but at the same time so indulgent and gentle. It’s a fairytale.

“They’ll like it here,” he decides quietly as they climb into the carriage.

In the village, they set about gathering the girls and their meager things. The Count gifts the old woman something, the villagers give the girls gifts of their own to see them off. For helping with firewood while the Count talks to the villagers, he gains ten gems.

The return to the castle sees Kase nearly melded with the Count’s shoulder while the girls are quiet across from them. It’s heartbreaking, the lack of chatter.

The Count’s hand more than once settles on his knee.

At the castle, Kase helps settle the girls into their own rooms, rather near his own. They are in awe of the giant bed and the wardrobe and the large, though still not as large as his own, bathroom. Kase learns as much of the castle as they do, that day.

In the evening, before supper, he pays the Count for three tolls and is ready to add in his board when the fae speaks.

“As long as you continue to help care for the girls, while you’re here,” he murmurs, sending a shiver down Kase’s spine, “Consider that your board.”

He wants to accuse the Count of rearranging the rules so much, but in the end it’s an even exchange, almost. It’s all in his favor, from what he can puzzle out.

“Alright,” he says at length before paying the final toll, then goes back to fussing over the girls.

The dream ends, as it always does, as it must.

Fox and Cody need to have bandages changed, need to have burns seen to. Rex and Dogma stare off into nothing. Boba runs for him, the instant he steps into the room they’re waiting in, and Kase holds his youngest brother close. Tup darts in quickly after, nearly knocking them both over.

Kase laughs, a rough, hollow thing.

Buir is fae-glassed, still, and might be for months at this rate. He was stuck in the Halls for who knows how long, to him. He’s brittle and sharp and by the gods he might just rip apart any fae who comes close. Kase can see the Count recognizes it too.

And there’s another, a young woman with white and blue braids that fall to her shoulders from buns atop her head. She’s tan skinned, but in a shimmery way that screams of a fae’s farce at immortality. Pale patches that might be vitiligo if she were mortal but are far too perfect mark her face.

“Lady Tano,” the Count drawls.

“Grandfather,” she replies.

He looks at all of them, at the collection of them standing in his hall.

They need to stay the night; there’s no way they’ll survive the hike out of Faery like this. Kase knows it; the Count knows it.

What would he owe?

“The domovoy will show you to rooms,” the Count says. “Lady Tano, you know where yours is.”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

Kase shoos his brothers off, shoos Buir off after a brief Keldabe, watches Lady Tano stalk off. He stands alone in the room, alone but the Count.

The Count catches his hand and kisses it, lets Kase shake against him.

“I wish him dead,” Kase says and means, of the One Without Fear, of whoever took his buir in the first place. “I wish him dead.”

“Poor mortals we are, Hardcase,” the Count reminds him, fingers tightening on his wrist. “We must want to change.”

Kase looks back at the door Lady Tano stalked through. “And some of you do?”

“Some of you do, too,” the Count murmurs. “Some of you can.”

Kase catches his eye and understands. He wants to gasp like he’s trapped, like he’s drowning, but he’s not. If he moved away, in this moment, the Count would let him. If he moved away, at any point, the Count would want to let him.

Vasillisa and Marya and Anya. The Count, Baba Nu, Merrin (who still owes him for those gems she stole and he’s only suddenly angry about it). The villagers, the spirits, the books, the temptations to stay in bed and stay in the castle and stay, stay in Faery.

He could.

“What do I owe you, for tonight?”

He can’t.

The Count sighs, leans down and kisses him. “You owe me tonight.”

Kase kisses him back.

That night in the Count’s bedchamber, there’s tenderness and heat and the chill of the Count’s hands.

The Count puts teeth to flesh like he’s a fresh fruit and Kase lets him. He lets him dance cold across his skin, frost crackling and melting.

Dinner is fed to him, fingers slipping into his mouth after treats and he has a place on a lap like some pampered pet, like some bride still dressed in wedding-cloth, but he’s bare and snappish, so hungry for whatever the Count gives him.

“What will you give me?” he asks against the Count’s lips.

“Nothing not returned,” is the rumbling answer that shakes through his chest.

The Count binds him to one corner of the headboard, wraps cloth over his eyes, and takes him apart. He begs and begs and begs and bucks his bruising hips, shouts his throat raw as nothing comes out, bites his reddened lips. Hour after hour, he is the Count’s toy as much as a partner in this giant bed.

“What will you give me?” he asks.

“Nothing belonging to others,” is the rumbling answer.

Cool lips linger against his chaffed wrists, against bruises on his ribs. Teeth worry at his nipples, nip at the creases between his thighs and hips, scrape down his cock as he moans. He squirms against cold palms that press into him.

“What will you give me?”

A whisper, a name to moan.

A whisper, a name to groan.

“Fuck me,” Kase hisses.

“That’s what is happening at present, yes, Kase,” Yan drawls, amused, and snaps his hips, drives himself further into Kase.

He arches, tenses, so tight and so hard that the tether snaps and his wrists bleed and he pants under Yan and sighs at the warmth of the spend between his thighs and across his stomach.

In the bath, his wounds are tended to, his bruises soothed, his lips kissed so softly.

Sleep comes in his bed, clothed again and tucked against Yan’s chest, interrupted in the early dawn by three mournful little girls so sad to see him go, then joined again with his back to the Count.

“Stay,” the Count offers, kissing beneath his ear at the sight of the three little ones softly snoring where they’re curled up against Kase’s chest.

“I have to see them home,” he replies, stroking fingers over Vasillisa’s golden hair, Marya’s upturned nose, Anya’s rosy cheeks.

The dream ends, as it always does, as it must.

The Count gives them a sledge to break through the icy landscape, big enough for all of them and for Lady-Tano-Ahsoka and for chests and chests of jewels and gold, of furs and silks.

Buir looks at it and looks at Kase and shakes his head, but there’s no judgement in it.

Home, like the Count’s lands, is frozen over, frozen soil and dead grass and a sprawling house tucked in the side of a mountain that Ahsoka marvels at.

“A year and a day,” Kase reminds her, carrying in one of the chests.

She nods, barely hearing him.

Buir pats his back, still fae-glassed but starting to thaw again already. “Only you,” he murmurs, kisses Kase’s forehead.

Kase laughs, he’s heard all the stories.

The chests will be inventoried, the safe bits sold to pawn shops and antique dealers and the too-fae bits sold to magicians, adventurers, or kept. After all, Boba is the seventh son, and Kase has now joined Buir and Fox in being fae-touched, and Ahsoka will be here a year and a day at least before she can join the other mortals properly. Having proper bargaining power for the Fae that creep into their lands, who try to steal them away, who might be in need of rescue or changing, is only good.

The clothing, furs and silks and remnants of his time roaming the Count’s lands will be kept packed away in the Fae-made cedar chests, where no moths will touch them.

(He left mysteries, in those lands. He knows it, he knows that as a mortal he could not go back and ask. As the Count’s husband, as something no longer mortal, he could.)

It’s in the pocket of one cloak, something fine and black-on-black with little firebirds and trees of life, like that first tunic, that he finds the box.

There’s a ring, inside, carved from solid opal that goes from black to a galaxy of blue and purple.

He knows the rules of fairytales, knows the laws of Faery as well as the tropes and structure that make up the stories that lead there.

If he puts this ring on his finger, if he twists it three times quickly, it will take him back to the Count’s lands, back to the castle and the girls and _Yan_.

He weighs it on his palm, holds it up to the light to see the colors glow.

“Kase, can you help figure out what’s gone bad in the fridge?” Rex asks.

Kase looks at him, looks at the ring. “Yeah, I’ll be a minute.”

He puts the ring back in the box, then the box in the pocket of his jeans, and goes out to help his family. Later, he’ll look again. Later, he’ll decide.

He has plenty of time.

**Author's Note:**

> The rules for both Fae in this Faery and for mortals visiting it influence the characters' and are present on their minds, but I didn't put them in because if y'all know that puts a WHOLE other spin on this. One thing I will say is that: if Hardcase had sold the mirror to Dooku, Dooku would have sent help for Kase's family without Kase knowing or asking. But since Kase had to bring it to him and ask, that is what created the need for reciprocal payment. That's just how the rules work.


End file.
